George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

He was a good son and brother, a good husband and father, without loss of manliness. No man was less a prig. No man, indeed, was ever more respectable, but the touch of genius makes respectability itself engaging. He was not subtle, but his directness can make subtlety look devious and insincere. He was not complex, but his straightness can make complexity look morbid and mean-minded. In 1863 Crabbe Robinson wrote in his diary:

“October 17. Dined with the Streets. Our amusement was three-handed whist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Street very kind. On every point of public interest he and I differ, but it does not affect our apparent esteem for one another. I hold him in very great respect, indeed admiration. He has first-rate talent in his profession as an architect. He will be a great man in act—he is so in character already.”

He lived afterwards in Russell Square and then in Cavendish Square; always in the dear, unspoiled, substantial, smoke-stained professional quarter, the London of those that live there all the year, where autumn lights vistas of tawny splendour down every street, and spring offers nosegays of early wall-flower and narcissus from the Scilly Isles at every corner; where the air perpetually tastes of soft coal, damp mud, and warm malt; where in December the moist pavement glistens with a permanent slime, and in May the porch roofs burgeon into azaleas pied and trailing pink geraniums.

His life thenceforth falls into such periods as Ezekiel counted,—a time and a time and half a time. Ten years, from 1855 to 1865, were given to church-building, to travel for the sake of study, to writing, beginning with the Brick and Marble in Italy and culminating in the Gothic Architecture in Spain. Mainly within the next ten fall the great commissions—for the Law Courts, for building the nave of Bristol cathedral, for rebuilding the cathedral at Dublin, for restoring that of York. If this period is closed with the death of his second wife, in 1876, there will remain just five years for bringing all to a conclusion, finishing wholly or very nearly the great works, lending a strong hand to such public undertakings as saving London Bridge, adorning S. Paul’s, rescuing S. Marco at Venice, and serving on the council of the Royal Academy. Finally, he was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He delivered, as Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy, six lectures on Gothic Architecture in the spring of 1881. Those were widely read at the time, printed in the weekly journal, the Builder, as they were delivered, and in the Architect; and reprinted by his son as an appendix to the Memoir. In that same year he died and on the twenty-ninth of December was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was only fifty-seven and he had been ill only a month.

With Street’s actual building I have little here to do. Immense in quantity, admirable in kind, it stands and long will stand, not only amid the dense green of English hedgerows and in the bitter grime of English towns, but beside the graves of Alpine valleys and in the Stranger’s Quarter of continental cities. Of its technical excellence, the way it meets and happily resolves the builder’s problems, I am not competent to speak. Architects have praised him well. The distinguished American who has devoted his own rich and exquisite talent to the quest of Gothic, tells me that Street, of them all, had the most genius. To the mere ecclesiologist, who comes to the American church at Paris, or the church and schools of S. James the Less, in Westminster, or the village spire of Holmbury S. Mary, it seems that if new churches must be at all, they should be thus. Where Scott’s work seems colder than death and Butterfield’s trivial or thin, Street’s alone has a kind of present life, a pulse, an inner glow. It is again the abounding life of the man which communicates of itself. Many have put their heart into their work, but only a great heart lives and burns in it.

IN LEON CATHEDRAL

Of architecture, apart from technical questions, structural or archaeological, there is little profitable to be said. Like the other arts which deal directly with bodily experience, it suffers from the necessity of translating into an alien speech. You may talk about Shelley forever, since poetry is made of words, or about Plato, since philosophy is made of ideas, but the truest praise of the Passion according to St. Matthew is reserved for the organ, and the real right comment on any Perugino is the Granducal Madonna. Criticism may take a lawful pleasure in explaining, first, how a given work of art came to be what it is—which is matter of history; and, second, why we enjoy it as much as we do,—which is matter of psychology; but the enjoyment itself criticism cannot express except by a laborious process of transmutation and translation. Of all the arts architecture is least apt for this sort of evocation. Even Pater hardly knows that song to which the memory of Chartres would, like a mist, rise into towers, though he could reweave by his magic the very spell of Botticelli, and recall with his subtle harmonies the very presence that rose so strangely by the waters of Leonardo. Those who have lingered at nightfall in the nave of Chartres until through mounting darkness the blue windows burned as by their own proper light, may know, some of them, that a great church, like the deep sea, like the ancient woods, like the starry heavens, can liberate for an instant the soul from the limitations of the conscious intelligence. But even if a man would tell of that, and no man would, there are no words for the telling. To put the matter another way:—the experience of music is a matter of the auditory sensations and their recall in memory; the experience of painting a matter of the visual, for the most part; that of architecture is a very curious combination of the tactual and muscular with certain respiratory and vaso-motor functions. Words, in each of the cases, are at the second and third remove from the actual appreciation; and moreover architecture shares with music, except where figure-sculpture enters in, the supreme condition that representation merges in presentation, that form and content coincide.

The love of thirteenth century France flowered in the beauty of Street’s designing; the knowledge of Catalan city churches bore fruit in the frequent use of the lofty nave arcade, which barely marks the aisle off, and opens all the church to sight and hearing of the preacher; the long acquaintance with Italian brick construction led to his perpetual endeavour by bands of colour to lighten the monotony of English stone. But marbles under a southern sun will fade and stain and modulate together, where other material and other skies will not effect the combination, and while I feel that some of Street’s essays in colour have been less happy than his other audacities, I feel stronglier yet that the fault lies more with the material at hand than with the shaping spirit of imagination.

He is supposed to have been at his best in designing middle-sized churches for general use, like All Saints’ at Clifton, and S. Margaret’s, Liverpool. I know he felt that he never worked more to his own mind than when he built his own church at Holmbury. The American churches in Paris and Rome, the English churches in Rome and Genoa, the Anglican churches at Lausanne, Vevey and Mürren are all his. The list of his buildings published in his son’s Memoir stretches from Constantinople to Trinidad. I notice that at the time of his death some called the new nave of Bristol cathedral his most entirely successful work. That may in a way be reckoned as restoration, if one likes, and remain equally characteristic, for Street did much work of restoring, and the list of original work is followed in the Memoir by a longer list of ancient work to which he lent a reverent hand. Against any restoration but the most reverent he protested, both generally and in such particular cases as that of the Lincoln doorways. He was a member of Morris’s “Anti-scrape” society, though once at least that body fell foul of him. The mere ecclesiologist in this case is again disposed to admit that if, to keep a church above ground, some restoration must be done, it had better be in such hands as his.